For a long time I've wanted a blog that doesn't require any form of maintenance hosting-wise. I hate hosting stuff. Spinning up a VPS or something similar just to get a blog started is just not worth it. And it isn't free. I scrolled through some options and found Eleventy (11ty) as an alternative.
The concept is that it supports a ton of template languages etc. which means a couple of things:
- You are the direct owner of the content. (Hinting a bit at Medium here).
- It is easy to transition to if you used anything other previously.
- It is future proof.
Using a starter#
I need to be honest with you - the documentation is way too technical when trying to get started with Eleventy. That's why I used a starter.
I chose a beautiful starter made by Stephanie Eckles, called 11ty-netlify-jumpstart. It has a very good "getting started" section.
Making it my own#
This starter is more of a static website type of deal, which is not really what I wanted. I was missing dates for the posts (and calling them posts).
I extended the layout for the regular page by just adding a date at the top, creating a new page type called post. Pretty straight forward.
---
layout: page.njk
---Voíla! That is it. I might do some minor changes further down the line, but this is good for now.